NERSC History

The Next Generation

In 2015, NERSC moved from the Oakland Scientific Facility in downtown Oakland, where it had been since 2000, back to the Lab's main campus in the hills above UC Berkeley. Today NERSC shares the state-of-the-art Shyh Wang Hall with the rest of the Computing Sciences organization: ESnet and the Computational Research Division. Today NERSC serves nearly 7,000 researchers working on 700 projects annually, with users in 2016 reporting more than 2,200 scholarly papers made possible by NERSC resources.

In fact, NERSC has become an active partner in scientific programs that both shape and benefit from high-performance computing. Our high-performance computing systems and excellent client services are now complemented by expanded expertise in computational and computing science. In addition, with the continued growth of experimental data coming from facilities all over the U.S. and other countries, NERSC has become a net data importer, taking in a petabyte of data each month for storage, analysis and sharing in fields ranging from bioscience and environmental studies to cosmology and high-energy physics.

As a result, the center's focus on data science has expanded as well. The Cori system was purposely designed to support these efforts, with a number of unique features that enhance data movement, analysis and job scheduling. In addition, NERSC has implemented several programS aimed at improving users' code and application performance on the Cori architecture, thus further enhancing their scientific productivity. Finally, taking advantage of the center's proximity to the University of California-Berkeley, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, major computer and data communications companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and the diverse scientific research programs at Berkeley Lab, NERSC continues to achieve a level of scientific and technological collaboration unequaled by any other high performance computer center.